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What We Do

EPA's National Center for Environmental Assessment (NCEA) is a leader in the science of human health and ecological risk assessment, a robust scientific process used to determine how pollutants or other stressors may impact human health and the environment. The Center champions the development and use of health and ecological assessments by interacting with other agencies, the scientific community, industry, policy-makers, and the public. NCEA occupies a critical position in EPA’s Office of Research and Development (ORD) between researchers in other parts of ORD and outside of EPA who are generating new findings and data and the regulators and decision-makers in EPA’s program and regional offices who must make decisions to protect public health and the environment.

The Center’s programs are broad in scope and involve numerous scientific disciplines. NCEA addresses the needs of stakeholders through evaluation, synthesis and analysis of the most up-to-date scientific information. These products serve as a major component of the scientific foundation supporting EPA's regulations, advisories, policies, and enforcement and remedial action decisions. NCEA also conducts cutting-edge research to develop innovative risk assessment methods and tools that help extrapolate between experimental data and real-world scenarios, improve our understanding of uncertainties, and facilitate careful evaluation of scientific evidence.